Installing VMware Tools (Guest Tools)
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Installing “Guest Tools”, gives a better user experience with VMware VMs. This is why since Kali Linux 2019.3, during the it should detect if Kali Linux is inside a VM. If it is, then automatically install any additional tools (in VMware case, open-vm-tools
and open-vm-tools-desktop
). The Guest Tools are also pre-installed in the Live image since Kali Linux 2021.3.
As of September 2015, VMware using the distribution-specific (OVT) instead of the VMware Tools package for guest machines.
Should you decide to create your own VMware installation of Kali Linux (rather than using our ), and you want to force a manual reinstall of open-vm-tools
(as something has gone wrong), first make sure you are , then enter the following:
Unfortunately, shared folders will not work out of the box, some additional scripts are needed. Those can be installed easily with kali-tweaks
:
In the Kali Tweaks menu, select Virtualization, then Install additional packages and scripts for VMware. Congratulations, you now have two additional tools in your toolbox!
The first one is a little script to mount the VMware Shared Folders. Invoke it with:
And with a bit of luck, checking /mnt/hgfs/
you should see your shared folders.
The second script is a helper to restart the VM tools. Indeed, it’s not uncommon for OVT to stops functioning correctly (e.g. such as copy/paste between the host OS and guest VM stops working). In this case, running this script can help to fix the issues:
For older versions of Kali Linux, here is our .